Given his propensity for self-depracation, Oli Howe would probably say that he puts the ‘harm’ into ‘reharmonisation’. His stock in trade is to take popular songs and use his jazz chops to bash them into sometimes almost unrecognisable forms, pairing the isolated vocal tracks with post-watershed chord progressions.
Hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers and countless professional musicians, though, are in on the joke. Howe has gone viral multiple times – including with muso-skewed reinterpretations by songs by the likes of Backstreet Boys, Destiny’s Child and Dua Lipa – and received likes and comments from many of the artists he’s covered.
The deadpan persona that Howe created has probably helped: each video has him staring blankly at the camera as he plays, while a painfully self-aware set of captions is displayed, entertainingly acknowledging the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. Imagine the reharmonisation skills of Jacob Collier, but deployed by a man who’s approximately 99% less excitable.
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Howe’s musical journey began when he was just three years old and started entertaining himself on the electric organ that was in the family home.
“My mum took me to a birthday once, and when she picked me up, one of the mothers told them that I played Happy Birthday with two hands, and that was before I was four years old,” he tells us. “So she was like, ‘OK, I’ll take him to a music teacher and see what he’s like.’”
By the time he became a teenager, Howe had reached Grade 7 on piano and Grade 8 on the cello, but classical music was never really his thing.
“I was always learning by ear from TV and film and records and tape cassettes and stuff more than I was learning classical music,” he says.
At the time, Howe didn’t really connect with traditional music theory, either. “I knew my way around the piano, and my ear was good enough to hear most things and pick it up very quickly, but I didn’t really have the explanation for it,” he says. “I failed my grade five theory at least two or three times. It just wasn’t something I really understood. It wasn’t taught to me in a way that made sense.”
It was when Howe went to college and was given a Real Book – a compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards that had chord symbols in it – that things started to make sense, but he never did a jazz degree or a formal course.
Instead, he developed his own method: “I’d been learning jazz transcriptions from a very early age,” he tells us. “I discovered jazz CDs and things like that very early on – I was listening to a few different artists, but not a huge amount of it because back in those days there was no streaming, there was no YouTube or anything like that. So it was just the CDs that I had or records that I had. So I just listened to them over and over and over again, and started to transcribe them bit by bit and make my way through them.
“By listening to them so often, a lot of that vocabulary and those chord shapes and stuff was going into my ears, and then when I started to try and attempt to play them, it became a lot easier to transcribe because I never physically transcribed, you know, to paper. I was just transcribing, you know, into my brain from the CD. So I started to pick up voicings and how these different genres sound.
“Then later, in my mid-20s and early-30s, is the time when I really started to go deeper into the theory and watch videos and things like that about how jazz harmony works, what scales and modes people use for soloing and that kind of thing. And that started to piece together with what I’d transcribed from all these records years ago. So I was like, ‘OK, now I have these formulas that I’ve been playing for a long time, but now I know how to recreate it and recreate it in every key.”
Howe says that he set about learning the history of jazz, going decade by decade and playing with as many musicians as he could around Brighton, where he was living. Alongside that, he was taking influence from the hip-hop and R&B that he listened to as a child.
“I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so you know, hip-hop was growing massively in that time, and me and my friends at school were hugely influenced by it. And there’s a big tradition of sampling in hip-hop, and a lot of it is sampled from jazz, soft rock and smooth jazz or yacht rock and stuff like that.
“Everything that had any kind of flavour of jazz for me was really appealing. Like early R&B in the ‘80s and ‘90s. En Vogue, SWV – that kind of stuff was really appealing to me. All the pop artists and soul artists like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince and Chaka Khan. There’s just tonnes and tonnes of really advanced harmony in that stuff, and the way it’s packaged into this commercial thing was super appealing to me. It had a really kind of advanced sound because there’s really beautiful harmony involved, really amazing modulations, yet it’s mainstream music.”
Alongside this musical education, Howe began to develop his production chops. “As part of the college course I was doing music technology on a very early Mac system with Logic 3, which is a long time ago. At that time, Fatboy Slim was a huge artist and I discovered how to sample and put these funk beats with various things that I could find, and really started getting into music production. And by the time I was 19, when I left college, I bought myself a PC and started producing at home as much as I could, and from then on I was hooked.”
Howe has been able to utilise all of these musical and technical skills in his ‘reharm’ videos, the seeds for which were sown in 2022 during a period when he was posting jazz tutorial content.
“I did a video – I think it was titled ‘Jazz musicians on a wedding’ – and it was a keyboard player and bass player playing Bruno Mars’ Treasure, and the kind of back and forth between a bass player and a keyboard player, and the keyboard player is overplaying. He’s bored and he’s having fun and he’s enjoying himself, and the bass player doesn’t know where he’s going to go with his reharm. So the kind of back and forth between us was kind of funny. I put the text on the screen and kind of had this conversation between the two players, and that went viral.”
Keen to capitalise, Howe started reharming other songs – the Killers, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Oasis, Queen, Amy Winehouse and the Spice Girls all got the treatment. After a bit of a break, he had another success with his smooth jazz version of Kenya Grace’s Strangers, but it was when he posted his reharm of Pharrell’s Happy, in 2025, that things really started to snowball.
“That one got a lot of attention from some really big names in the industry, and that one went really viral,” says Howe. “I think I must have grown by maybe 10,000 followers in a week or so. I did a few more and out of the three that I’d done, two of them went viral, so I was like, ‘OK, I’m onto something here, and the consistency of posting every week is helping.’ So I carried on doing them, and yeah, I’ve done about 85 reharms now.”
Howe has also picked up some celebrity fans along the way, with the many of the artists whose songs he’s covered responding with likes, shares and comments.
“It’s the ultimate compliment, showing their approval like that,” he says “It’s an honour to get that kind of feedback from them. I then immediately DM them on Instagram and try to get a conversation going and, more often than not, we do.”
This means that Howe has had some pretty surreal text encounters: “I’m chatting to people that I’ve grown up listening to and have been massive influences on my musical identity. People like Lenny Kravitz following me was such a huge one. I mean, not a guy that I see posts much on social media, and somebody whose albums had a huge impact on me when I was growing up. Somebody like him, who is a multi-instrumentalist and plays the majority of the stuff on his albums, I just found him to be a hero, one of my heroes, and people like that following me was massive.
And then there was Justin Timberlake, who responded to Howe’s reharm of his 2016 smash Can’t Stop The Feeling, taken from the animated movie Trolls, by saying “Of all the ones in my catalogue… of course he picks the song I wrote for a children’s animated film to completely body!”
“Justin commented on a couple of videos, and then just continued to support, liking posts here and there, and then we started talking,” reveals Howe. “It’s amazing to be chatting with these people.”
Howe has also managed to get onto the radar of music industry legend David Foster, famed for his work with everyone from Earth, Wind and Fire and Chicago to Whitney Houston and Celine Dion: “He commented and then he sent me a DM saying, ‘Where did you come from?’ And I was just like, “Oh my God, what do I say to that? Brighton?’”
Aside from his excellent musicianship, some of Howe’s success has undoubtedly come from his work rate. He’s supercharged his reharm output over the past year or so, so what’s his secret?
“I have a template which I’ve loaded with all my sounds, everything that I like to use – all the drum kits, all of the synth sounds and effects and everything – and everything is mixed to a certain level so that I can just jump in and start writing,” he explains.
“That helps me to get straight into songwriting – I’m not held up by thinking, ‘right, what sound do I need here?’ I’ve got all of the keys loaded in – Rhodes, piano, electric grands – everything that I could possibly need is already in the template, ready to go, mixed, and that makes my workflow much, much faster.”
This means that Howe can now write and record a reharm in just two or three days, but there are exceptions.
“Some of them take six months,” he admits. “There are songs that I knew I wanted to do, like Livin’ on a Prayer, for instance. I knew that would be such a huge song to do, and I must have made about seven or eight versions of it, trying at least eight starting points where I was just like, ‘I’m not happy with any of these,’ until I found a version where I was like, ‘OK, I think I can pursue this one’. That’s happened quite a few times where I knew it was a big song and I wanted to get the best version that I could have done.”
Musically, Howe says that the core of his reharmonising formula is jazz and gospel harmony, which crosses over into R&B and funk. “The defining characteristic of my reharms, if I was to give you the secret sauce, is that I don’t reharmonise the melody, I reharmonise the key,” he explains. “The melody is important to a point, and if there are notes that stick out, then I’m gonna pay attention to them, and in places I might make a point of choosing to play outside the key in a different way than my usual formula does. But essentially, I’m reharmonising the key because the melody is in the key.”
As for those dry-as-a-bone captions, Howe says: “I try to portray a sort of uncomfortably self-aware version of myself. I’ve done a lot of therapy in my time, I’ve gone through quite a lot of things that have made me quite self-aware about quite a lot of issues that we all face and might not understand, and, especially the early reharms, I was using a lot of that humour to kind of explain what it’s like to be human and what it’s like to go through things, and using the lyrics to play off that as well.”
Inevitably, Howe’s success has led to requests for him to share his secrets: “Over the last year, a lot of people have asked for lessons, and they all want to know the same thing: what am I doing to get to the final reharm? How do I get from this chord sequence to the chord sequence that I’ve written? Over the course of, maybe six months to a year of teaching people what my methods are, I’ve developed a system which I can now explain to people quite easily, and I’ve now developed that into a course called the Rehab Group Sessions, which I started in March this year.”
Howe now has a new website where you can book onto one of these sessions: “In my course I show people how I can move in and out of the key very seamlessly and get you back into the key using tension and using methods that feel like they’re a lot more complicated than they actually are. It’s stuff that, if you’ve played jazz standards, if you’ve played certain types of music, even Stevie Wonder music, you’ll notice that there are a lot of similarities with the concepts that we use to play that stuff that I’m using in these reharms.”
Fans of his work may be disappointed to hear that Howe doesn’t plan on being ‘the reharm guy’ forever, but at a time when making a career out of being a musician is becoming increasingly difficult, he’s hoping to use the profile he’s built and the contacts he’s made as a springboard.
“One of my goals is to write more with original artists,” he says. “I had a song come out with somebody a couple of months ago, and I’ve got probably at least three or four other productions that I’ve done of artist music that will be released. I’m also writing for other people, and my plan is to release music and tour the music, so over the next six months, you’ll see a little bit of a shift in how my content looks, and it will be more of an insight into what’s going on with me, where am I taking this, and what’s coming up in the future.”
Whatever comes next, Howe has certainly left his mark on Instagram – check out his profile to enjoy all his reharms – and as our conversation comes to a close, he has some advice for any musician who wants to make a similar impact.
“On social media, it’s very common that people think that for short form content you must use a hook. You must have your videos 30 seconds to a minute long maximum. Your watch time needs to look like this. You need to sort your hook out or your content sucks.’
“It’s utter rubbish, to me anyway, because I’ve broken all the rules. I’m making three-minute-long videos, and I’m never using hooks and I don’t follow any of the rules the content creator gurus tell you is the successful strategy to go viral in 2026. It’s completely individual, and the strategy is you. You know, you are the strategy. The strategy is being authentic and connecting with rather than trying to grab people’s attention. The key is to grab your own attention and then present that. If you like it, somebody else will like it, and you can then connect with your audience over time.”
